


Tulip, of the Shire

by Aragonitemoved



Category: J RR Tolkein, The Hobbit, lotr - Fandom, middle earth - Fandom
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 00:18:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19414516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aragonitemoved/pseuds/Aragonitemoved
Summary: “As long as there are sharp edges, blunt edges, wet grass and gravity,Hobbits will need mendin’.My answer to someone on another social media page who believed there weren't advanced medical professionals among Hobbits because out in the country they didn't need it. Having ground up in Rural Route, America, I claim to know better than that.Watch a young Hobbit lass grow up. Her life's path is already written out for her, but that's not actually the problem...





	1. Chapter 1

Tulip, of the Shire

Part I: Hearth

“As long as there are sharp edges, blunt edges, wet grass and gravity,   
Hobbits will need mendin’.

Tulip Clock learned this on her father’s earth-smeared knee. His clothes smelled of sweet summer grasses and the rich loam now over her mother’s grave. She smelled like tulips: red ones, yellow, pink, white, and purple. Plant my tulips, Mam had said to them all as the fever rose up a last time. Plant them, my loves. And they did. A blanket of blooms thrived over the swelling earth. Tulip was named after her mother, and her mother’s mother, and she was already accepting she’d have a little Tulip herself someday. On the other hand, her twin brothers were sound asleep in the double-large cradle cut of applewood trunk with the Rainwater cousins at the fire…and she couldn’t imagine a greater humility than being given the names of Peapod and Shawp! That is, unless it also meant you were a Peapod and Shawp swaddled down with three other toddlers. How could babies snore? And so much?

Every belly present groaned from the weight of the funeral feast, and the last of the presents were finally exchanged. They’d passed out the things Mam (everyone called her Auntie) Belwether-Clock wouldn’t have given to her children and shared them with what felt like the entire known Hobbit world to the little girl. Old-fashioned folks, those Clocks from the Northern Shire. They held what was needed until it was time to pass it on. No squabbling over silverware or antiques for them. Those things weren’t important, not like treasured recipes and books and the box of tools or the secret location of the sea-salt licks.

Tulip was almost asleep on her father’s lap. Buzzard Clock had a slow, soothing way of drawing on his pipe, which was small and sweetly pungent. The stone was carved like a tiny hedgehog, and if he really puffed it up the two little holes drilled for the eyes would glow, making the little ones squeal with terror and delight. A matching hedgehog perched on the top of his heavy walking-stick for his turn at Shirriff, the same color as the feather in his hat-brim. He lowered the pipe almost to her eye level as she cradled her head against the pillow of his chest, ear beating gently with his heart. Nose to nose she and the hedgehog regarded each other, its red eyes fading as if it too was drowsing off.

“She’s a bit young to start the trade, Buzzy.” Someone’s far away voice from the corner by the fire.

“Young shoulders, maybe, but an old head a-top. Full of good hobbit-sense…”

“We’ll never not need medicine…”

“Plenty of us’d be glad to help...”

“Be a treat to have another one around. There’s two, even three in most of the other farthings…”

“Remember those drownings…didn’t have Bridie Gamwich to bring them back! We need more of the likes o’ her…”

“Young folks these days… now that things are nice and qu-i-et, they don’t think about getting ready…Ye harvest in fall, plant in spring, strive in winter, berry in summer, and in peacetimes…quiet times…ye go t’school…”

Buzzy patted his child on her back as the kith and kin droned on. Like all the Clocks, he was known for his dab hand with whatever needed doing, be it sewing up a gash or setting a bone or brewing up a purge. But with his wife’s passing he was feeling his own particular clock ticking, one that reminded him everyone’s got only so much spring in the gears, and Tulip was almost his age when he started the learnin’…Proud he, youngest doctor the Shire’d ever seen then…wonderful fingers, they all said. 

That was in his youngling days. The hand supporting his sleeping daughter ached, and the other hand sucked at the warmth of the stone hedgehog, greedy for relief of pain. A life of freezing late nights helping deliver backwards lambs and stubborn goats not to mention putting a man’s innards back where they belonged had turned his wonderful fingers into aching stubs of tree root. Yes, she’s young, but the Shire doesn’t have the time. Its important stuff, the White Arts. Passed down male to female and to male again, in the oldest of traditions. Over his head the Grandfather clock ticked, ticked, and ticked some more, reminding him again that his family has made a point of never forgetting the lessons of time.


	2. Part 2: Home

Tulip, of the Shire

Part 2: Home

“Harrumph! Mph! Hnh! Beggone!” 

Annoyed at the greedy insects hoping to endrunken themselves on his good smoke, Nex Greentoes blew his disapproval and a fragrant cloud of burning pipeweed over the already blue air of the pub. Accustomed to the cheaper cut, the attackers fell stunned .

“That’s one way to kill a candlebat.” Chuckled old Clock.

“I’m not sorry.” Nex complained. “I was putting up my best winter waistcoat today for next season, you know the one with the gold buttons and that lovely madder? What did I see? Little chew-holes! All over!”

Clock led the others in a sympathetic inhalation. Hobbits lived to let live but moths against the best wool was savage war. After the inhalation comes the exhalation. Tulip sipped her hunkleberry squash and watched another wave of moths go down under the smoke. It never failed to be an impressive sight.

“I suppose you’ll have to have another made,” offered Godfather Flattop.

The reaction was as violent as expected. The patrons barely had time to brace themselves before the treat of a full-scale tirade as only a Greentoes can craft, wobbled the lamplights.

Tulip glanced at her father by the sides of her eyes. Thanks to his ‘bit of a thyroid’ he could see her practically behind his ears. He chuckled under his breath. “Now there’s why I ast’ him to teach you the good curses, lass.”

Tulip understood his reasoning. A good proper curse was essential for a healer if they were up against a foe: be it a stubborn disease, a wound that refused to heal, or a patient blind to the logic of staying home and taking care of that broken ankle. On the other hand, her recent and unrelenting exposure to the old fellow’s eloquence had allowed her a degree of immunity. She stopped paying attention when he started to repeat himself.

An old woman, familiar to everyone, content to sit in the draughtless corner with the moggies in her lap, grinned around her three remaining teeth. The Gammer was enjoying the show. She made Tulip a little uneasy; once she finished memorizing Nex’ oral poetry, she’d be off to learn from the Gammer.

“—and a plague o’nightmares to the lot!”

Bushy Hobbit eyebrows went up at that tiny bit of gaffe. Perhaps the venerable old warrior of the spleen was feeling his years tonight; it wasn’t like him to aim such a careless arrow! Tulip saw her father’s bottom lip tighten, briefly, then slip a look loud with silence over to Gammer’s Corner. The old lady nodded once, her thick, gnarled appletree hands delicate as they traced the slithery black stripes of a tabby’s back.

Hobbits are not eager to admit to much of anything. This is a charcoal mark against their normally chalky character. ‘Stubborn’ was for beasts of the plough but ‘firmly focused’ belonged to Halflings. This general arrangement of manners and polite discourse, in which Tulip saw enough verbal side-stepping to resemble a country dance committed to the mouth and ear, shifted its rules as often as the linens on a summer clothes-line.

Few Hobbits were uncouth enough to admit to having actual nightmares. Nightmares? Pisha’tosh! Whoever heard of such wispery! Indeed, most of the old folk claimed such things couldn’t really exist. The stomach is the wisest organ, young Hobbits! You make it unhappy and it’ll send you a notice of its displeasure, right enough! Tulip dreaded evenings in the small pubs. One elder would start the topic up in the corner and before the young people could sing, ‘Heigh, ho the donkey’s home’* as a distraction or perhaps sly social commentary; the old ganders would have four or five venerable sages, handed down from generation to generation in the families, puffing and blowing on those old soapstone pipes nobody knew how to make anymore. Tulip grew up seeing the chorus of them bobbing and nodding, their grizzled appledoll-heads swaying in the breeze of their own proclamation like so many harebells on the stalk. 

Now, the more boisterous lot that do things like…go to Bree and drink a bitter by the pint…they might be troubled by simple things that’s their own fault: a bed without clean sheets. Should the pillows have been plumped? Heavens, what if the bed-cords hadn’t been properly stretched for the season! The worms got into the pipeweed! And it was a nice strain too!

There’s also the things that aren’t quite their fault: after all, who can blame anyone, especially a Brassgarrett, for taking a little too much of the cold roasted woodcock? Perhaps he forgot how much of the Old Redleaf ‘1301 was still in the bottle (and who did the bottling is important too!).

Adults have problems like this. Tulip fathomed they resembled the children’s in different dressings. She and the Pease, as they call the twins, might have gotten carried away with the jam-cakes at the supper party…She was certain she saw her Brandybuck cousins pick up the Old Gaffer’s liquid harvest instead of sticking to the children’s small beer. That’ll be a guaranteed bit of moaning and tossing in the sleep tonight! And then of course, Gandalf’s fireworks if not lit by his own hand is a guaranteed frightening of the littlest ones.

While the other Hobbit children memorized the little rhymes that help them sleep at night, Tulip learned the ill-curses, the well-wishes, the blood-stopping poems, the rune for headaches, and the breath that eases pain. Because there’s nothing completely 100% effective, she was also stuffing her head with tourniquets, rubbings of the scalp, and the secrete behind the milky gummy tears of the poppies in Mam’s garden. For every ailment there’s a cure, but some ailments need four or five. Every family kept its own charms; each family might be a little different than the neighbors’ but Tulip soon notices that the worse the problem, the richer the poetry. 

“A field hand stepping too near the threshing blade, going into the shake, can save his own life by concentrating on The Bloodstoppers Verse, calming himself down while help comes. And, if you pay attention, little Tulip, you get little clues in the words on what herb will work, what joint needs a tug.” That old moth-hating Hobbit with the priciest, most exclusive pipeweed in the Shire had a foul temper but he was always right.

Tulip stood and let the last of the sweet juice slide down her throat. It lingered as she wandered out into the soft night. So many hunkleberries made that one drink. Let the Big Folk have their strange gods; Hobbits preferred a reverence for what maintained good quality living. It made more sense to live well and die content than spoiling the good sweet earth in fighting. There was only so much blood the soil could hold…Dew and mist and snow was what should curl the hairs on the feet.  
Suddenly pensive, the girl wended up the sunwise spiral of path that led to the small graveyard. Hobbits didn’t like big graveyards; it could get crowded, like a family reunion at the inheritance. Better to have small plots set aside for a morsel of stone, just big enough to cut a name, or planting a tree, shrub, or flowers. Once planted, a memorial was left to thrive politely as it chose, which was why no-one cleaned lichen and moss off the stone markers. It was impertinent to get in the way of the natural order of things.

She settled by her mother’s plot. It gave her a soothing overlook of an endless sky and prickling stars, still glimmering with winter’s ice. Her back rested against the field-stone her father and uncles had brought up to mark. Everywhere else were the tulips. Summer was here and tulips should have gone, but in the back of the slope was a much higher slope, a north crescent where the seasons were slow to come and slower to leave. The tulips still bloomed here, tiny trickles of gently glowing white and buttercream and stripes, feathers of red and purple and yellow and orange patiently growing themselves in the direction of the world. On the far side of the hill the very faintest echoes of light smoked the horizon: the graybeard wizard had found one last firework up his sleeve for the children.

Tulip felt content and she felt quiet inside herself, like she was tiny again in her mam’s arms. Her hand reached out of its own accord and plucked up a glimmering tulip petal. It crunched in her teeth, sweet and watery, the taste of home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Heigh, ho! The donkey’s home!  
> He drank my beer down to the foam!  
> I did so yell, I did so scold,  
> But all he did was glare and gloam!  
> (Now his teeth are big and bright  
> And the biggest bull he’ll gladly fight)  
> I won’t brag and I won’t moan  
> So I’ll give’im the fiiiiiight  
> \--To the pub I’ll go!


	3. Chapter 3

Tulip, of the Shire

Part 3: Journey

The mustard fields were dark green and buds fattened with the promise of a new crop. The Shire’s strains were named (as tradition demanded) after the land itself, but you had sub-species, or, ‘cousin strains’ beneath that: The Shire White, which bloomed first, had pale seeds with a fruity bite perfect for fish and poultry…and then there was the Shire Brown, heavy, hearty fat balls that seasoned the winter sausages and meats. All over the green swells of land the bee-keepers were fidgeting from foot to foot, champing at their pipestems like so many impatient horses, counting an re-counting the bee-skeps and hives that would be moved to their summer homes pollinating the flowers. 

Tulip’s brothers were two of the many youngsters to waggon-off to work the spiceries. It was traditional: young Hobbits got their teeth cut on honest work by putting them in places where the fruits of their labours, as it were, happened quickly to suit their shorter attention span. They’d return in early fall with their portion of the single-cut mustardblossom honey, and a small linen sack of seeds for grinding. Some had to pay for their lodgings with housekeeping to their hosts, but In the twins’ case they were housing with ‘those daft Eggcorn cousins off the Brandywine’. Eggcorns were very permissive if you helped with the hens and tolerated their rather unique dialect. Tulip was glad of the change. Not that she didn’t love her brothers—she adored them. But…Peapod and Shawp were too curious for their own good and that led to a daily dip in the family’s medicine chest (which was now sorely in need of honey, and mustard, and old bedsheets for bandages thanks to them…)

Daily.

Now that they were older, the curiosity burned even hotter—being taller meant seeing more things to fire up that giant query-mark in their brains—and with Tulip apprenticing another summer out in the opposite direction across the river, their father could finally lean back and enjoy the peace and quiet with the cats. And possibly also with Widow Holdfast, a strapping stout warrior of the hearth with one ear deaf and the other tin, who rightfully bragged that her sons were settling by Buckleberry to train as ice-sledgers. While they train-up they’d be sure to notice how the river’s channels are full of fat, lazy catfish. I do like me a thick steak of catfish over the coals, I do.

Tulip had (shamefully) thought the Holdfast Lads were just planning to loaf about away from home, but on their ride over to the ferry her waggon-jostled brains were swamped by their magpie chatter on work, duties, the excitement of standing wages in the bank, extra work for extra profit, time off, and a hundred other things that told her she lived in a completely different world from the two, who valued ‘workman’ as a compliment and delighted in puzzles that needed hands for solving. Summer was the time to learn the river, play like otters every inch and curve, for winter would be the unforgiving test of their knowledge.

“Did you hear that the Big Folk down by Grubb’s is trying to stop their mayor from cleaning out the brooks?” Herb asked their driver—a lovely old Hobbit that knitted baby pampooties in his spare moments for bairns in need. They answered to Spinner, but Tulip didn’t know their birth-name any more than anyone else in the world.

“Might’ve heard something to that affect, young Master Herb.” Spinner answered peacefully. “Can’t imagine that’ll happen, seein’ as how it’ll ruin the little fish. And little fish grow up to be big fish.”

Tulip peered up, but all she saw was the shape of thick, brown hands in silhouette against the bright morning, fingers loose on reins. The donkeys on the other side of the reins knew the road by heart. Rumour had it they would protest if they went anywhere else, by simply sitting their haunches down and staring stonily at nothing while everyone screeched. 

Tulip’s world was mending, and practical though it was, a mender didn’t worry about things like bills, invoicing, salaried time, investments or even where their next meal was coming from—if she was hungry someone fed her. If her clothes were torn there was another dress someone had to give. They gave to her and she would give it all back when she got her Mending Badge.

“I’ll catch the biggest bull of those big fish!” Herb promised as the three of them, baggages and luggages shifted about their feet upon a large pot-hole. As the oldest, Herb Holdfast thought it was his responsibility to make the strangest promises. Or so Tulip had long suspected. “I’ll roll him in coltsfoot ash and sweet ferns, roast him over a bed of hickory-nut-charcoal, and I’ll eat the whole thing!”

Forb Holdfast snorted cheerfully at this mouthwatering declaration of hostilities and pulled riverduck-fluff out of his curly black hair.

Herb blinked uncertainly. “Well?”

“Oh, I hope you do, I do. Because last year, Old Soaps, he landed a nine-stoner of a river monster and it took him’n the whole town to put up the rest in salt when they were tired of eating it!”

“What, the whole town? Even Bob Cherrystones?”

“Ahhh, he said he was there…no doubt standing by and giving advice and cheering on the Hobbits doing the real work.”

Tulip joined in the laughter. The Holdfasts were two of the merriest beings anyone could meet, but they were conversely, mannerly young Hobbits, and they stifled their noisier humour before the ferryman poled close enough to hear them. The old fellow was half Bloodhorn on his mother’s side and she was first cousin to Granfer Cherrystone. One of the first lessons anyone learned as they grew up was…even a deaf man can hear and a mute can talk. 

“Here, Mum’s given us too much bread. Let’s give some to Old Wartjaw for comin’ early.”

“Oh, he’ll like that. He’s sweet on Mum’s baking, he is.”

“Tulip, share lunch with us. We’ve got this bread and new butter than even Forb can eat in one go.”

“But I’ll be hungry when we get to our job!” Forb whined so theatrically even the crows must have known he was joking.

“You’d best be hungry for Auntie’s cooking, brother.” Herb gave his sibling an affectionate slap on his rather-larger belly. “She heard you were coming!”

“You act like I can eat more than you.” Forb mourned, again dramatically. It was true; Herb could eat like three Hobbits and stay skinny as an elf. Their Mum gave up on worming him after he turned twenty without any show of improvement.

“Ah, just keep your strength up, brother.” Herb poked him gently. “There’s talk of a new buyer for the pipeweed over by Orthanc. That means barrels and portage year-‘round!”

“Orthanc? Who told the Tall Ones about our pipeweed I want to know!”

“Who says they did? Old Greyhame-Fireworks probably brought some back home with him. You know how wizards are..”

Forb turned his head and smiled just for her. She liked him. She liked them both. No Hobbit was ever too young to notice kindness and generosity.

“Here, I’ll get that for ya’,” Forb leaned down and easily lifted Tulip’s luggage trunk as the waggon rolled to a slow, dusty stop. The resultant creaking of new brass bolts and fresh leather straps sent a water-ouzel to flight.

“Oh, but that’s too heavy,” Tulip began but the trunk was already up on his shoulder. Forb paused, evening out his weight on his shoulders, and winked. 

“Watch this!”

Herb matched his grin, and lifted up their two lighter leather bags, stacking them on Forb’s other shoulder. Gape-jawed, Tulip watched the brothers walk confidently (if cautiously) down the little trail to the wooden dock of the ferry. Forb carried; Herb guided. Waggonmaster Spinner chuckled and got out to light his pipe away from the ‘discerning and discriminatin’’ noses of his donkeys. 

“They’re sledgers a’right.” He nodded. “That’s a trick they know. Here now, you!” The darker donkey, Berry Black, had found his pipeweed pouch and while he didn’t approve of burning it, was hoping to snack on a twist. “Not time t’worm ye yet! Mind your sister, she’s a good gel!”

“How do they do it?” Tulip murmured. The little ferry was rocking and sending up little waves of water against the bank as the boys settled their heavy cargo evenly across the points of the flat-bottomed boat. Such were the forces, the soft riverbottom was stirring up and tiny fish flashed in the underwater storm, seeking food.

“All in the balance, lass. You can carry your own weight if it’s all evenly spaced. Forb’s stronger than Herb, so he carries a bit more, but Herb’s more agile; he goes first to feel for loose stones and cobbles and things Forb could trip over. They granfer taught them that trick back when they were too little to carry anything heavier than a teapot! Now they can do it wi’t’out thinking. Who needs to see the strongmen in the circus when you’ve got a good brace o’ sledgers?”

“All ready, Tulip!” Forb bellowed cheerfully, and slapped his pot belly with the flat of his palms, making a loud ripply crack of sound. Feeding minnows swam for safety in a fanned-out pattern.

Everyone seems to run to or from something, Tulip thought, and then wondered if that was one of her own thoughts.


End file.
